I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

JAMF Tries To Resolve The BYOD Two-State Conundrum, But Does It Succeed?

One thing I’ve written about in the past is my doubt about the approach to mobility that is taken by many traditional vendors. Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions from vendors like VMware and Citrix come from a paradigm that suggests there are two distinct types of data for employees: their own personal data and corporate data. These vendors then create solutions that segment a mobile device into essentially two distinct areas. One is for business and one is for personal data. These vendors would have you believe that never the twain will meet.

The reason that I’m dubious about this approach is that it fundamentally ignores the existence of context. Individuals’ lives can’t be segmented into these two hard and fast pigeon holes, employees are far more nuanced than that. They work on different projects both within and outside of the organization. They collaborate with fellow employees on out-of-work stuff and they ebb and flow between a work and a home state many times a day.

These solutions, in my view, fail to take account of this and hence fail to do anything other than keeping IT happy with regards its governance, risk and compliance duties.

Which is where JAMF comes in. JAMF Software, and its Casper product, aim to make it easy for businesses, schools and other enterprises to use and manage devices in their organizations. The company boasts of 4000 customers globally managing some 3.5M devices. They must have something right, no?

With its latest release, JAMF is trying to return some context to a polarized view of mobile device management, the idea being that within a relatively tightly constrained construct, there is still allowance for a degree of blurring of the lines. Without changing the native experience on a user’s device, JAMF delivers the following features:

Management and security settings are transparent to the user – informing them of anything IT can do on their personal device

IT can only remove corporate data from the device. This protects the user’s personal data, such as photos and documents

Integrates well with enterprise networks and simplifies user enrollment by automatically prompting the user device for enrollment once it detects it’s on the network.

In some ways I like what I see here – increasing the transparency to end users over what control IT has on the device, and only allowing IT to get their hands on business data – it puts some of the power back in the hands of the users. Allowing users to install their own apps, connect printers, chose passwords and the like without IT intervention empowers the end users. Meanwhile IT can “promote” the most appropriate applications and settings that the user can chose to use, or chose to ignore.

JAMF seems like a step in the right direction but it’s still a little constrained, a little artificial. It’s better, and a blurring of the lines is positive, but until we get some understanding from IT that these lines they’re trying to enforce don’t really exist, any solution will be, at best, half way there.

And that fundamentally misses the point about BYOD and all it can do for organizations.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.